Leominster event June 14 aims to raise suicide awareness

LEOMINSTER -- Volunteers behind a suicide-prevention group for corrections officers are hoping to raise money with a softball tournament next month.

Bryanna Mellen lost her father, Michael Mellen, to suicide in August 2011. He was a corrections officer who worked for 22 years at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley, a maximum-security prison, and had retired in 2010.

"Before he passed away, he didn't really talk much about his job," said Bryanna Mellen. "I started doing research on mental health and corrections officers. Once I saw the numbers, they just shocked me."

While research on corrections-officer suicides have been limited, a 2009 report from the New Jersey Police Suicide Task Force found that corrections officers have a suicide rate 39 percent higher than other occupations, and twice as high as that of police officers.

"They have a huge amount of stress, day in and day out, and they are in a negative atmosphere," said Bryanna Mellen. "They lose the ability to separate their work life from their home life."

She said this causes a high divorce rate as well as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide.

She said her own father had an undiagnosed case of depression, PTSD and became cynical and paranoid.

In 2012, she started the On Guard Initiative with her childhood friend, Julie Broderick, to help draw attention to the problem of suicide and other mental-health issues with corrections officers.

She said there is a stigma that prevents corrections officers from seeking help for mental-health issues, as well as structural issues.

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Corrections officers who seek help can have their duties restricted or may be taken out of the job for treatment. She said these safety precautions discourage some from seeking help at all.

"We want everyone to know we're not associated with the state," she said. "We're a third party that they can feel safe going to."

On June 14, Massachusetts corrections officers have organized their eighth annual Law Enforcement Softball Tournament at Fournier Field in Leominster.

This year, half the revenue raised at the annual fundraiser will go to On Guard and the other half will go to the Boston Fire Department.

The event is organized informally by corrections officers and is not affiliated with the Department of Correction.

Bryanna Mellen said they will use the money to organize support groups. One will be for corrections officers, another for their spouses and eventually a third one for their children.

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